Sekou Diakite has released an alpha version of a KDE Look and Feel for Java. This is an interesting step forward in Linux/Unix desktop integration since Java applications can now use the KDE/Qt libraries for drawing Java widgets and even directly use existing KDE widgets such as the file or color choosers. See the webpage for further details of this accomplishment including future plans and, of course, screenshots.

Azureus uses the SWT GUI (which most commonly uses GTK on *nix for native widgets---yuck) rather than the native Java Swing GUI, so I don't think this project is going to help there. Maybe the other two apps though.

Limewire doesn't show a systemtray icon on my desktop (which was annoying because the default behavior when you try and close it was to go to the system tray, so I would have to kill the process then). Last tested on KDE 3.5.1 and Limewire 4.8.1.

It is just the way someone used to programing under windows looks at the tools under Linux... You can say a lot about how bed windows is, I'll probably give you right in a lot of things, else I wouldn't be looking to linux.

But I'm still having a little problems starting programming under Linux, or under KDE for that part. Installed Qt4 and doing some basic programming with KATE. But I'm still looking for something that invites me to programm..... (Under Linux ofcourse)....

You mean you want to develop for KDE or in Java? For Java the tools are excellent, try NetBeans or Eclipse. KDE tools are also suberb, I liked KDevelop (though I never used it for GUI apps) and I believe it now has form designer integration. Admitedly it's not quite Visual Studio 2005 by it's good none the less.

Hello Alistair,
I think that's this is a misunderstanding,
I really don't understand why you think this is not a free software.
From the begining, the licence is GPL, the subversion repository is open to anonymous access, and since yesterday, the source code .tgz is directly on the web site.

By the way, I do not own an X86-64 System, if your willing to compile/test the native part of the project to X86-64 it would be great.

A while back I wrote a simple mp3/ogg/wav player in java. I wrote different frontends to it to get to know the various toolkits better. It has an SWT frontend for my native looking windows fun, a Swing frontend for cross platformness, and a Qt/KDE frontend for fitting in to my KDE desktop.

Using the Qt frontend, the Gtk-Qt engine for GTK and the KdeLAF, I can make all three frontends use the same Qt style, with varying degrees of success.

This pic is the results, with some commentary. KdeLAF has a little ways to go before I would replace the Qt frontend with it.

Hi,
Its great, but a developer don't care what tool he is using, it is the convenience that matter. Lesser time to market the better, development of good looking screens Good, but what about Enterprise Apps Development, Already people have rejected the idea of using multiple IDE for same project. Just remember java is a chosen platform for EAD.

I've always felt that some people don't understand (not the developers of KDELandF, in particular... just developers in general) that making a GUI *look* similar isn't what the goal should be. IMHO, the overlooked, and yet keystone, component is complex datatype support in the clipboard.

No interface, in my opinion, has yet to match NeXTSTEP in terms of sophisticated clipboard support. You could drag any data, from any application, to any other. KDE is getting pretty close to NeXTSTEP's functionality, but I've never had any luck with non-trivial (plain text) copying of data dragging between KDE and Java apps -- say, Konqueror and GalleryRemote -- and this is why I almost never use Java GUI apps. Well, that and the VM being a memory hog.

The KdeLaf calls JToolbar.addImpl method sooner than other look and feels and as a result yesterday's build from http://www.netbeans.org used to fail with

java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.openide.awt.Toolbar.addImpl(Toolbar.java:616)
at java.awt.Container.add(Container.java:390)
at org.freeasinspeech.kdelaf.ui.QToolBarUI.installComponents()
at javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicToolBarUI.installUI(:128)
at javax.swing.JComponent.setUI(JComponent.java:652)
at javax.swing.JToolBar.setUI(JToolBar.java:159)
at org.openide.awt.Toolbar.setUI(Toolbar.java:1178)
at javax.swing.JToolBar.updateUI(JToolBar.java:170)
at javax.swing.JToolBar.(JToolBar.java:136)
at javax.swing.JToolBar.(JToolBar.java:97)
at javax.swing.JToolBar.(JToolBar.java:85)
at org.openide.awt.Toolbar.(Toolbar.java:157)